Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Sometimes it can take more than a
decade for a completely sensible idea to catch on. So it is with what may be
the single best money-saving idea in last year’s state budget, one that is just
now beginning fully to take hold.

The idea, part of a plan by Gov. Jerry
Brown to appease a panel of federal judges demanding ever more releases of
state prison inmates, calls for the possible parole of several hundred convicts
who are chronically sick or mentally impaired, plus a new parole program that
could affect thousands of the elderly, defined as over 60.

It’s an idea first proposed to this
column in 2002 by reader Ray Procunier, then a Grass Valley resident.
Procunier, who died two years ago at age 86, was director of corrections
in California under Gov. Ronald Reagan and during part of Brown’s first term in
the 1970s. He also headed prison systems in Texas and Utah.

“When Reagan was governor, we cut the
prison population by one-third and there was no increase in crime, not even a
blip,” he wrote 11 years ago, in response to a column. “I guarantee I could cut
down today’s prison population by 100,000 or more and not hurt a soul in the
process.”

Among his chief suggestions was the
wholesale parole of prisoners over age 55, regardless of the
Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out law or their specific sentences. He would have
kept murderers, rapists and other serious sex offenders behind bars unless they
had major chronic illnesses. These tactics alone, Procunier said, would cut
prison costs by more than $4 billion – equivalent to at least $5 billion in
today’s dollars.

Brown made something very similar a
central point of his plan to comply with the federal court’s ruling on
prison-overcrowding. The big question: What took so long for this idea to
percolate to the top?

The
most likely answer is inertia, along with a fear component, as no politician
ever wants to appear soft on crime. This proclivity helped produce
Three-Strikes and to increase the state’s prison populace from about 25,000 in
1980 to 170,000-plus in 2008. It’s taken the court order to cut that down a
bit.

So far, as Procunier predicted, the
early paroles have caused no significant statewide crime increase. As
of mid-March, California had set loose 74 elderly convicts, with thousands more
waiting their turn. Releasing the chronically ill will likely have a similar
negligible impact on crime, although just 76 such paroles had so far been
approved.

This is true because national crime
statistics show most violent crimes are committed by persons in their teens,
20s and 30s, and very few by persons aged 55 or above. At the same time, the
cost of maintaining hospitalized inmates ranges between $68,000 and $125,000
per year apiece, depending on where they are treated. That’s significantly more
than the average $47,000 annual cost for maintaining the typical healthy
convict.

So far, 15 other states acting on this
kind of information have begun expediting releases of elderly prisoners, who
can use pensions, savings, Social Security, welfare or the resources of
relatives to cover their expenses outside custody. Most ill inmates released
early can be covered almost immediately by Medi-Cal under Obamacare, while the
state gains not only prison space, but also can stop posting two guards in each
of their hospital rooms around the clock, as required for prisoners
hospitalized outside the prison system.

All this explains why the current
Brown plan makes sense, both as a means of helping comply with the court order
and saving many millions, perhaps billions, of prison dollars. Too bad Brown
and other governors didn’t have the good sense to do this many years ago, after
Procunier first suggested it.

-30-

Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

It
was supposed to be a $5 billion project, creating 6,500 jobs. That was the hype
when Tesla Motors last summer orchestrated a five-state battle to host a huge
“gigafactory” where it plans to build batteries for its next generation of
electric cars.

Anyone who’s driven one knows the
Tesla Model S seems to take off like a bullet from a standing start, pushing
driver and passengers back into their seats with strong G-forces.

But the only bullet involved with the
luxury electric car company’s battery plant – to be built in association with
Japan’s Panasonic Corp. – is the one California dodged by losing the plant to a
location near Reno, Nev.

For construction of this plant is not
exactly moving like a speeding bullet. Rather, it’s plodding along, at best.

Meanwhile, Nevada has already okayed
spending at least $70 million on roads to service the plant, not to mention an
unknown amount in property taxes lost to the exemption given the plant as one
incentive to build there. Iron workers had erected $15 million worth of steel
framing on the site by early winter. Then came an apparent slowdown.

An early March Reno newspaper report
quoted a post on the national union job board of the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers saying “Project Tiger” – the Tesla plant’s code name –
“has been cut back by 80 percent at this time. This is all subject to change.”
In short, Tesla is hiring far fewer electricians than previously planned.

This could be because of reported
problems finding and/or keeping competent project managers on the job -- or
not.

The development came almost
simultaneously with the company downsizing its China production facility,
cutting 180 of 600 employees there, or 30 percent of its workforce.

Was there a link? Possibly not, but
Tesla wasn’t saying, insisting both that the Nevada plant is right on schedule
and that there’s nothing to worry about in China. But if Tesla’s sales of its
high-end Model S – which can cost about $120,000 – have slowed, might that
affect the pace for rolling out its promised mid-price, mid-size car, due to get
its batteries from the Nevada plant?

Company kingpin Elon Musk isn’t
saying. The firm sold only 120 cars in China in January, behind its projected
pace and one reason Tesla stock has traded lately at more than $40 below its
2014 peak. Musk maintains this was because many urban Chinese don’t have access
to garages, where American Tesla owners most frequently recharge their cars.

He insists this is a very temporary
glitch, because Tesla is fast building a large chain of recharging stations
across much of China, with nearly 700 slots now open in 70 cities.

This all appears to mean great
uncertainty for Tesla, and for the state of Nevada, which eventually will pony
up $1.3 billion under promises made when it landed the battery plant. No one
knows the pace with which the plant will be built. No one knows if it will
produce the thousands of expected jobs, for which Nevada will pay well over
$100,000 each if all 6,500 materialize – more for each if the plant hires fewer
workers.

Nevada has never paid anything like
that to casinos or other big employers. Nor has California ever paid so much in
corporate welfare. Plus Tesla will pay no local property taxes for years to
come and no one knows who will build schools and hire teachers for children of
the putative new workers.

That’s what California “lost” when it
didn’t get the opportunity to subsidize Tesla’s battery plant, which could have
been sited near Stockton. Just now, it looks like this state dodged a
significant bullet.

A larger question, of course, is
whether any government should make corporate handouts on so grand a scale.
Whenever American companies encounter similar government subsidies to their
foreign rivals, they gripe about unfair competition.

And yet…Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen and
Mercedes Benz all have gotten similar packages from states like Texas,
Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi.

The ultimate outcome of the Tesla deal
is not yet known, but right now it looks like California will be far better off
by losing the battery plant than if it had “won” the competition.

-30-
Email Thomas Elias at
tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

It’s now a certainty that Kamala
Harris will have an opponent on the November 2016 ballot. But much less certain
is whether that opponent will be any more threatening that Elizabeth Emken, an
autism activist who placed second in California’s 2012 Senate primary election,
was to incumbent Dianne Feinstein.

For one by one, potentially formidable
opponents to the election of Harris, now the state attorney general and
previously district attorney of San Francisco, have fallen by the wayside since
early January.

Billionaire environmental activist Tom
Steyer took himself out early. So did state Treasurer John Chiang, followed by
former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and current Lt. Gov. Gavin
Newsom, the former San Francisco mayor who opted instead to run for governor in
2018. Then former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took herself out,
possibly because she would have had to face questions about her role in
deceptions that led to the war in Iraq. Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin also
nixed a run.

Any one of those four fellow Democrats
and two Republicans could have posed a threat for Harris’ bid to replace
the retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer. Harris doesn’t look particularly intimidating,
but she got to work very quickly on the Senate race, declaring for the job
almost immediately after Boxer announced her impending retirement.

Before
anyone else had done much of anything, she staged high-profile fund-raisers in
Bel Air, Long Beach, San Francisco and Washington D.C. At the same time, she
quickly got endorsements from dozens of prominent Democrats. Harris, who
handily won reelection as attorney general last fall before starting this run,
also was helped when her investigators raided the home of the disgraced Michael
Peevey, former head of the state Public Utilities Commission.

Investigating Peevey, who drew praise
from Gov. Jerry Brown and other major Democrats even as his alleged corruption
became more and more evident, has made Harris seem politically independent and
a tough backer of consumer interests.

Put all this together and she’s a
pretty intimidating candidate.

Yes, there’s still the possibility of
someone else substantial getting in against Harris, whose name was
recognized by only 40 percent of likely voters in one late-winter poll. But so
far, the only declared opponent is Republican Assemblyman Rocky Chavez of San
Diego County.

Several Democratic congressional
veterans, realizing that gerrymandering in other states has made it very
difficult for their party to regain control of the House of Representatives,
also might risk making this run.

While Harris’ early entrance, bully
pulpit as attorney general and her early endorsements strengthen her, she lacks
the huge war chest used so often by senatorial candidates like Feinstein, Alan
Cranston and Pete Wilson to scare off significant opposition. Newsom, who
quickly raised $800,000 this winter to run for governor atop the $3 million
left in his campaign kitty after last year’s run for reelection, will plainly
try to employ financial intimidation against all but billionaires when his
campaign gets serious two years from now.

But Harris didn’t have that kind of
money before she began raising new funds and has not made a formal financial
report. She had just $1.3 million in her campaign account when her reelection
run ended last fall, and it’s unclear how much of that is transferable to a
federal campaign.

By
contrast, Burbank Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff had $2.1 million in his war chest
at last report, and all of it could be used for a Senate run if he opts for
that over reelection. Schiff has also said he thinks it’s time a credible
Southern California candidate challenged the state’s San Francisco-based
Democratic power elite, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Newsom, Harris, party
chairman John Burton and Gov. Jerry Brown, with his base across the Bay in
nearby Oakland.

Villaraigosa,
with strong appeal among Latino voters,
had appeared poised to be that kind of candidate before pulling out.
Another Latino might yet emerge as a Harris challenger, with Orange County
Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez and Xavier Becerra of East Los Angeles, part of
the House Democratic leadership, still possibilities.

But right now Harris dominates this
race, in part because she got in early and acted fast. Unless someone else acts
soon, it figures to be more coronation than contest.

-30-

Elias is author of the current book
"The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the
Government's Campaign to Squelch It," now available in an updated second
edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

It’s now possible that mid-February
will be remembered in years to come as a fateful time in the century-long
history of the California Public Utilities Commission. That’s when, without
offering any legal justification, the five commissioners spent public money to
hire a criminal lawyer.

If
courts find this move was as blatantly illegal as it looks to some, they may
soon cease treating this powerful but disgraced body that sets power and
natural prices for most Californians with the extreme deference they
traditionally have evinced.

Should
judges reverse this possibly illegal PUC decision, how long before they begin
looking askance at some of the commission’s other dicey rulings favoring giant
utility companies over their customers.

Right now, state and federal
authorities are investigating the commission and its immediate past president
Michael Peevey. Among tens of thousands of released emails are some showing
inappropriate, potentially illegal, contacts between Peevey, at least one
present commissioner, and high officials of regulated companies like Pacific
Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison Co.

This was predictable from the moment
Peevey joined the commission more than 12 years ago, first appointed by
then-Gov. Gray Davis and later reappointed by ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. No
one could reasonably expect Peevey, a former Edison president, to deal
objectively with his friends and former colleagues. It was a classic case,
first noted here in 2004, of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

The
lawyer-hiring decision shows that despite pious declarations from Peevey
successor Michael Picker about how “decisions should be based on the record
developed in public,” things may not have changed much since Peevey departed as
2014 ended.

With criminal investigations in full
swing, commissioners signed a $49,000 contract with the Los Angeles law firm
Sheppard Mullin, defense attorney Raymond C. Marshall of the firm’s San
Francisco office in the lead role. Marshall is charging a “discounted” rate of
$882 per hour. The $49,000 won’t go far at that rate.

The
commission has also used Walnut Creek lawyer Katherine Alberts to stonewall
requests for records of PUC communications about a 2014 settlement forcing
customers to pay $3.3 billion of the $4.7 billion cost for retiring the San
Onofre Nuclear Power Station, owned by Edison and the San Diego Gas &
Electric Co.

But California Government Code section
995.8 says that a “public entity is not required to provide for the defense of
a criminal action…” It adds that before hiring defense lawyers, an agency like
the PUC must formally determine such a defense “would be in the best interests
of the public entity and that (employees involved) acted...in good faith…and in
the apparent interests of the public entity.”

The PUC made no such
determination and held no public hearings on hiring attorneys. Nor has it said
who its criminal lawyers will defend.

This spurred a lawsuit from former San
Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre and his partner Maria Severson. They want the
commission to reveal who its new lawyer will defend and hold hearings on
whether that’s in the public interest.

Aguirre said other commission
decisions may have been made improperly, even criminally, including the San Onofre
settlement. Another he cited was a ruling last November assessing a measly $1
million fine against multi-billion-dollar PG&E, also cutting its natural
gas rates by $400 million a year as penalties for its conduct around the
aftermath of the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion that killed eight
persons. Even new commission president Picker, who voted for those penalties,
now says the company should pay much more.

Aguirre
also questioned a $14 million settlement with SDG&E after a 2007 fire ignited
by power lines downed because of poor maintenance. That blaze destroyed 1,500
homes in northern San Diego County.

The courts' traditional deference to
the utilities commission has never before encountered criminality in commission
conduct of its business. Meanwhile, the commission refuses to answer questions
about its legal authority for hiring outside criminal lawyers.

All of which means utility regulation
in California has moved into a state of high flux. Who knows? It might soon be
open season on those other questionable decisions and more and that could lead
to rolling back some of California’s sky-high utility rates, which are at just
as onerous and compulsory as high taxes.

-30-

Email Thomas Elias at
tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Way back in 1811, almost 40
years before California became a state, then Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry
okayed a congressional redistricting plan guaranteed to let his
Democratic-Republican Party control his state’s congressional delegation.

The plan – motivated by Gerry’s loss
of a seat in Congress after opponents set up a district he could not possibly
win – contained a district shaped like a lot like a salamander. This led to use
of the term “gerrymander” to describe the process by which legislatures draw
districts to ensure outcomes they like.

Fast forward 197 years to when
California voters short-circuited that process by approving the 2008
Proposition 11, which set up an independent citizens’ commission to draw state
legislative district lines starting in 2011. Two years later, passage of
Proposition 20 added congressional districts to the commission’s task.

Now, after two election cycles
featuring many more close and competitive races than California had seen in
decades, the citizens commission’s work may be thrown out by the U.S. Supreme
Court via a case brought by leaders of the Arizona Legislature.

Ironically, the plaintiff Arizona
politicians are Republicans fearing a weakening in their control of that desert
state. But if the Republican-dominated high court rules for them, it will be at
the same time be increasing Democratic hegemony in California, where almost 80
percent of Congress members already are Democrats.

But that would not be inconsistent for
this Supreme Court, which has shown for almost 20 years that it cares little
about increasing voter turnout or letting voters make their own choices.

The current justices have gutted the
Voting Rights Act. Most were on the court that in 2000 threw out California’s
former “blanket primary” system, adopted by voters in 1996. Under that system,
challenged by both major political parties, anyone could vote for any candidate
on the primary ballot, regardless of party registration. The leading
vote-getter in each party then made the November runoff election. Most current
justices also were on the court that – also in 2000 – called a halt to
recounting votes in Florida, thus assuring the presidency for Republican George
W. Bush, who tallied about half a million fewer votes than Democrat Al Gore. In
all those cases, so much for what the majority of voters wanted or for helping
more Americans exercise their right to vote.

So it was hardly surprising that
several justices appeared in a court hearing this month to favor the arguments
of the Arizona Legislature’s Republicans, who argued that the Constitution
gives the right to redraw congressional districts each decade exclusively to
legislators.

They noted that the Constitution says
“the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and
Representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof.”
Of course, choice of U.S. senators was taken out of legislative hands in 1913
by the 17th Amendment, but even before then, many states were
electing senators by popular vote regardless of the fact that Article 1 of the
Constitution still said senators from each state were to be “chosen by the
Legislature thereof…”

So there’s plenty of precedent for
deviating from strict constitutional construction, even without an amendment.

But, as cynics might say, tell that to
the justices.

Justice Antonin Scalia, leader of the
court’s usually controlling conservatives, claimed in the early March hearing
on the Arizona appeal that when the Constitution says “Legislature,” it means
only elected lawmakers and not the mass of voters who often pass state law via
ballot propositions. Never mind that initiatives didn’t exist in 1787.

Letting a commission draw districts,
Scalia said, “is giving this power to an unelected body…”

Californians deliberately did just
that. And the work of the first citizens’ commission, vetted by the state’s
non-partisan auditor, has gotten generally good marks.

Chances are if the court – due to rule
on this case before July 1 – rules for the Arizona legislators, the decision
would quickly be applied to California via lawsuits in lower federal courts.
That makes it possible new congressional districts could be in place by the
2016 primary, drawn by Democratic legislators to favor election of even more
Democrats to Congress. Voters would be lucky if lines look no more convoluted
than salamanders.

But there’s one large comfort here:
Any such ruling would apply only to congressional districts and not state
legislative lines. So the citizens commission will be back in 2021 no matter
what, even if its work is not as broad as it was four years ago.

-30-

Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

It’s beginning to look like the
hosannas that greeted California’s first-ever groundwater regulation law were a
tad premature when it passed late last summer.

For after a tantalizing winter of
heavy rains but insufficient snowfall to dent the state’s four-year drought,
confusion over the groundwater rules has begun to set in.

One thing for sure: The rain and snow
of the just-concluding winter have not been nearly enough to begin recharging
California’s more than 100 significant aquifers. These have been pumped without
regulation for many decades, to the point where land subsidence has become
highly visible in the San Joaquin Valley and some other areas.

The new law’s rules sounded just fine
– until someone happened to look at the time limits. The rules are set up to
force water agencies to design local regulations preventing further overdrafts,
an overdraft defined as pumping more water from underground than percolates
down to replace it. The state will review all such plans and take over
regulation if locals don’t enforce their new restrictions.

Sounds great, and it might improve
matters 25 years from now if there’s anything left in those aquifers. There had
better be: California gets almost 40 percent of its current water supply from
underground, and a California with little groundwater would have to cuts its
population considerably.

But there are no guarantees, partly
because local water authorities have until the end of next year merely to
decide who controls ground water in each area – this could be county
supervisors or irrigation district officers or just about anyone. Whoever gets
jurisdiction will have five to seven more years to design plans creating
sustainability – a balance between pumping and replenishment. After that,
they’ll have 20 years to put the plans into action.

So it might be about 30 years before
the rules have any detectable effect, and at current pumping rates, there would
be little or no groundwater left by then. Which means this law has never
had teeth. Nor, after lobbyists for ground water users got through with the
Legislature, was it intended to.

It’s all been happy talk all along.

But even that is now dissipating.
While the choice of agency to control ground water has been easy and obvious in
some areas like the Coachella Valley of Riverside County, which sits atop a
gigantic underground lake, disputes are rising elsewhere.

Canal districts want control in some
areas, but so do nearby irrigation districts. In some places, county
supervisors want control, even though aquifers never conform to political
boundaries or property lines. In some cases, more than one water agency’s
boundaries cover parts of a single aquifer. In others, water agency lines cover
more than one source of underground water.

So power struggles are now in nascent
phases, with some officials nonplussed. “I expect we’ll coordinate to share
basins with other districts,” says one water manager. “But we’re unsure how to
do that.” And the new law doesn’t spell out patterns to follow, another of its
multiple flaws.

None of this, of course, prevented
farm area lawmakers from opposing the weak new law while it was under
consideration. Their shortsighted obstructionism has made that law practically
unworkable even before it’s supposed to get started.

So this law is both ludicrous and
worthy of satire, except that the continuing depletion of aquifers is no
laughing matter.

Which means it’s time for the
Legislature to get back to work, if lawmakers are capable of that.

The timetable needs to be cut
from 30 years down to no more than five. There must be a mechanism to create
new groundwater agencies if existing districts can’t resolve disputes.

And there needs to be far more
reliable information on the exact amount of water in each basin. Failure to do
any of these things will surely produce a far more severe disaster than the
current drought – unless Mother Nature intervenes with several years of much
heavier rain and snow than California has seen in decades.

-30-
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski
Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign
to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is
tdelias@aol.com

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

California has bled many millions of
dollars because of the myriad blunders by former Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, who probably should have remained a muscleman actor and never
ventured into politics.

Spending has barely begun on the high
speed rail project he enthusiastically backed without worrying about troublesome
details like its precise route or whether it can ever attain the ultra-high
speeds he promised. Many dozens more millions of dollars have been doled out –
with lots more to come – to build refueling stations for hydrogen fuel cell
vehicles long before anyone knows whether consumers will buy them.

The $15 billion deficit-payment bond
issue Schwarzenegger pushed on California voters ended up costing the state
almost twice that, when interest was counted.

But at least the disastrous real
estate deal the fading movie star pushed is at last dead. True, it has now cost
the state more than $24 million without producing even one job or
one dime, but at least it is gone.

This deal began as a high-stakes
auction in 2009, when Schwarzenegger cast about desperately for solutions
to the state’s seemingly perpetual budget shortfalls. As he looked for revenue
sources, Schwarzenegger pounced on 11of the state’s trademark buildings,
including the Public Utilities Commission building in San Francisco, the Justice
Department in Sacramento, the Supreme Court building in San Francisco and the
pink granite Ronald Reagan State Building in Los Angeles.

The top bid deemed credible in
Arnold’s auction amounted to $2.3 billion (just $600 million in immediate cash)
for the emblematic structures. The rest of the money was to come in the form of
savings on things like janitorial services and power and gas bills.

Schwarzenegger-appointed
spokesmen for the state Department of General Services pronounced the deal
“fantastic,” to use one of the ex-governor’s favorite hollow expressions,
saying it would help get the state out of its financial hole without costing
much. But other state economists at the same time estimated the deal would cost
taxpayers $2.8 billion over 30 years as the state rented back its own
buildings.

It was never clear how $600 million
could do much against a cash shortage variously estimated between $27
billion and $45 billion. So, like his 2004 bond issue that bought nothing, this
was another of the many short-cuts Schwarzenegger tried to use to solve
problems without making sacrifices.

Realizing that incoming Gov. Jerry
Brown had pegged the real estate deal as a disaster during his 2010 campaign,
Schwarzenegger tried to sign documents cementing it during his term’s final
hours. But he missed a line or two, allowing Brown to cancel the deal within
his first few weeks in office.

This rankled the private real estate
firms that had combined on the winning bid and expected to milk big profits
from the state. The firms, through a partnership called California First,
headed by the Irvine-based ACRE LLC and Hines Inc. of Houston, TX, sued to keep
the sale alive, and it festered on for four years.

A court date arrived at last in
December, but the judge wanted no part of any testimony. Instead, he ordered
the sides into negotiations, producing a $24 million settlement last month.

So the state escaped from this one
with a loss of less than 1 percent of what was projected if the deal had gone
through, plus legal fees. Meanwhile, it continues to operate the buildings,
which remain prominent symbols of state government.

At the same time, Brown’s tactics over
the last four years, including the Proposition 30 tax increases he pushed
successfully, have eliminated the annual budget shortage despite constant
pressure from the Legislature for more spending. There’s also been some help
from the recovering economy.

One lesson here is age-old: It’s
generally far better to make some momentary sacrifices than to sell off a
birthright, and it’s especially bad to sell off anything important just when
the market for it is bottoming out.

No one has explained how even the
shallow-minded Schwarzenegger could miss this salient point.

The pity is that even as this Arnold-era
blunder ends at last, others keep right on losing money.

-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book,
"The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the
Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover
fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 93 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Greater Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.